Intro

It has been a while since my latest post, primarily due to a lot of presentations at work and the fact that I got into the Microsoft MVP program. I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out what that means and participating in the Microsoft MVP summit. The MVP summit spread over three days, and during those three days, I participated in almost 24 hours of teams meetings with the product teams. Loads of good information, but it does drain the energy as well.

Intro

In this post, I want to show you how to set up Azure Migrate with VMware vSphere. I will go through the entire process of discovering, testing, and migrating virtual servers from my home lab environment into Azure. It will be a long post with many pictures, but I don’t feel splitting it into a series makes sense.

I have used the Microsoft documentation as a guideline for this blog post. You can find all the information on this Microsoft site.

Intro

Azure Template Specs is an option for storing Azure ARM templates inside Azure to ease sharing templates across your organization. Accessing Template Specs is controlled with RBAC assignments, making Template Specs security like most other Azure resources. Template Specs deploys resources in Azure and is compatible with the tools we know already, so PowerShell, Azure CLI, Pipelines, and the Azure Portal.

To deploy from a Template Spec, a user only needs “Reader” permissions to the Template Spec, but permissions to create the resource in Azure are also required.

Intro

Lately, I have been looking at Azure dashboards to provide a quick overview of services running in Azure. In this post, I want to show you how to create a dashboard showing the state of virtual machines, S2S VPN connections, and network peerings.

Azure Resource Graph Explorer (RGE)

The base for the dashboards in this post is RGE. I will create some queries to generate the data I want to show on my dashboard. RGE is a Kusto Query Language tool that allows you to query your Azure resource with lightning speed. You could find all the information with PowerShell or another tool, but using RGE is a lot faster. One important thing to remember is that RGE queries are case-sensitive, so check the casing if your results are not as expected. To query my VMs, I need to find which table contains information about VMs. I can see this table by going to a VM in the portal and selecting “Properties.” The portal will now show me the “Resource ID,” In that context, I can find the table name right after “/providers/.” In this case, the table I need to query will be “Microsoft.Compute/VirtualMachines.”

Intro

Building on my last article on integrating Azure DevOps into Microsoft Teams, I want to show you how to incorporate dashboards and kanban boards. The integrations can be helpful when co-workers might not be inside Azure DevOps every day but are using Teams. Some of the integration can also provide co-workers/users the ability to create bug reports without having them inside your Azure DevOps environment. This article will add two dashboards and one kanban board into a Microsoft Teams channel. Let us get started.

Intro

I want to show how to add Azure DevOps into Microsoft Teams in this post. I will show how to add the App to Teams and integrate it with the DevOps pipeline. The integration will display any pipeline actions, and it will also post any approval action into teams. With this integration, you can delegate activities in DevOps to coworkers who are not comfortable with Azure DevOps but are very pleased with Teams. In short, let us use Teams to ease the interaction with Azure DevOps.